Whatever comes to mind, as it comes to mind.
Here mainly to prove that I am, indeed, still alive.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

RCR GMTR

I played in my first "large" Riichi-rules tournament yesterday online (actually using the "prize money" I had won from a small sit-and-go tournament to pay the entry).

The organizers had finally found either the brains or the courage to remove players who didn't show or left during the tournament (they've only been doing this since 2007), so we finished with only 32 players out of the original 40. The cost of course is having to wait until the previous round finished to learn your seats for the next round.

There was a bit of a glitch as the "shuffle" algorithm wasn't expecting that, and two of the people who I played against in round 1 played again in the last round.

I managed to beat one person at every table. Fortunately, there was only one other player at my second-round table (the other two were no-shows), so that counted as a win.

Seven points was good enough for 19th place, not in the top half in the final tally. The overall winner was at my final table (and needed to win, as she only had a half-point advantage over the player in second place, who also won).

My defense definitely deteriorated over the course of the day; I had more table points winning only one hand in my first game (-6100) then I did winning three hands in the last game (-11800). Some of it was frustration over ill-timed disconnects, some of it bad luck, some of it carelessness.

None of my really big hands materialized, although I did call riichi on my first turn for the first time ever. That hand went to six tiles left in the wall when RHO went out self-drawn. I did have some inadvertent big hands (one ready hand with five dora+kong dora+ura dora tiles, after my opponents had put out two kongs). The time I flipped over a 2C as kong dora after konging a 3C ended up being a draw hand, though.

Now that MJT has fixed the auto-move feature so that it doesn't give way too much information to the other players, fifty-minute rounds are not such a horrendous idea. The third game I believe we did manage to finish, technically, as I won the last hand (to just barely get me out of last place) with 0:03 on the clock. The first game we weren't anywhere close; I was original north, and I didn't get my first chance to deal until less than 10:00 on the clock, and we certainly didn't get through a whole round after that. And getting four games in in four hours works out quite well. I guess they use the same time limits for MCR; even allowing for the fact that the deal always passes I wouldn't think you could actually finish a four-round game there. (But then you never could under the old time limits either, so that's really a wash.)